The present invention is directed to a telecommunications control system allowing a user to talk to a person or company providing information on a computer.
The growth of the World Wide Web (hereinafter “the Web”) has increased the amount of information that is available to consumers about products, vacation sites and many other things. However, due to the desire to place information on the Web quickly, often the information is not arranged in a fashion that answers the consumer's questions or satisfies the consumer's needs.
In parallel with the information growth, the Internet is being used for more generalized communication through technologies such as voice-over-IP. Proposals exist for providing telephone services over the Internet. One such proposal is Request for Comments (RFC) 1789 by C. Yang dated April 1995, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
One use of the voice-over-IP technology is the Net2Phone service originally provided by IDT Corporation and now provided by Net2Phone, Inc., the assignee of the present invention. Using the Net2Phone service, customers can use their microphone and sound card to carry on a conversation with a called party. The called party is “dialed” by providing a phone number to a Net2Phone server that actually connects the call through the public switched telephone network (with or without using an intermediate long-haul network).
There remain problems with integrating the voice-over-IP technology with providing information on the Web. One such problem is the lack of uniformity for being able to link information on a Web site to a destination phone number if the consumer or viewer still has questions. Although it has been proposed to add an interface for dialing telephone numbers to information displayed in the Web pages (e.g., using the Click2Talk service provided by the assignee of the present invention), adding the interface to each Web site and perhaps each individual Web page may be resource intensive. Furthermore, when the phone number corresponding to the information changes, further changes may also be necessary on the Web pages.